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<Paper uid="E85-1032">
  <Title>NON STANDARD USES OF IF</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="222" end_page="223" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
CONCLUSION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have found 9 different non standard uses of if, as summarised in Table I. However this does not require there to be 9 different meanings for if. Three meanings are sufficient.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Four of the different uses are explainable by pragmatic considerations, a point we made when criticising Austin's claim. His two ifs are the two uses in category BI; the differences arise from differences in the scopes of the speech act and the conditional and are common to other SCs. The factual use occurs when both the writer and reader know that the protasis proposition is true and is used for emphasis. Lastly the protasis may occur without an apodosJs when the speaker is interrupted. All four uses are based on the standard conditional meaning of if; the non standard uses arises from pragmatic considerations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The counterfactual use arises from an interaction with the subjunctive mode in the apodosis. This is common to other SCs and so does not require an apart meaning of if.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The use of if to introduce a noun clause DOES require an apart meaning of if as no inference relation is present. This suggests that the feature of if to introduce a proposition of unknown truth value is predominant over the inference relationship feature. The factual use of if is the only use in which the former feature is absent; then Jt is a stylistic consideration that leads to the use of if, i.e.  to add emphasis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The three remaining uses are possible candidates for a third meaning of if, as none display an inference relationship. These uses cannot be accounted for by some pragmatic variation of the standard conditional, such as a shift in the scope of the speech act, nor are similar uses found with other SCs in general. In two of these uses, restrictive and concessive, the protasis must be a phrase; but these phrases cannot be derived from a corresponding standard conditional clause.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Two uses, doubtful presuppostion and restrictive, have a semantic feature in common, namely that there is some feature of the apodosis, x, which may need to be modified. We propose that if here has a meaning equivalent to material implication, i.e. x v not-p, which is equivalent to p D x. This is the traditional logicians suggestion for the standard meaning of if.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> We do not accept that in the standard conditional use the meaning of if is equivalent to material implication; such an equivalence runs into difficulties. For instance it requires the equivalence of: If I hit you, it'll hurt.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Either I don't hit you or you'll be hurt.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> and such unacceptable reasoning as: God doesn't exist, so if God exists we are free to do what we want.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Several attempts to save the equivalence have been made. For instance Grice (1967) did so by requiring that speakers adhere to certain conversational implicatures, such as saying as much as they know, thus ruling out the use of a conditional if sentences with a false protasis. Formal semanticists propose some slight modifications. For instance Stalnaker (1975) claimed that in any context in which a sentence of the form not-p or q is acceptable, a sentence of the form if p then q is also acceptable. Elsewhere (Bree, 1981) we have taken issue with these and other attempts to demonstrate equivalence of if with material implication.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> However in the use of if to doubt a presupposition or to make a restriction, the meaning of if can be considered to be equivalent to material implication. It also occurs infrequently (3%) with standard conditionals: (62) (...) if 1 don't put my two cents in, someone else will.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> in which there is no inferential relation. This meaning differs from our standard meaning in that the truth of the apodosis proposition is sufficient to confirm the sentence, e.g. knowing that 'someone else will' is sufficient to confirm 62. Similarly for two other uses: with the doubtful presupposition use of if, knowing that the apodosis is true is sufficient to confirm the sentence, as the presupposition is no longer in doubt; with the restricitve use, the apodosis is the minimal assertion that is being made so its truth is sufficient for the truth of the sentence. So the x v not-p, or material implication, meaning of if accounts for these two uses of if.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> The last non standard use of if, the concessive, is an anomaly. There is no question of inference, but neither is there any affinity with material implication, e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> speedy if temporary ~ speedy or not temporary.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> \[t is possible that this use is a contraction from even if. We refrain from suggesting a fourth meaning of if. We would expect that translations into other languages would not be to the conditional, e.g. with Dutch if in such expressions is translated using zij her, literally be it. In conclusion, we propose that if has three different meanings, all of which have one feature in common: the truth status of the protasis is in doubt. They are, in order of frequency of occurence in our sample: 1. inferential (p~q): as used in standard, counterfactual and factual conditionals, together with the conditional speech act, the performative conditional and the use of the protasis without an apodosis (in this last case the inference is left open); 2. material implication {q v not-p): as used in a few standard conditionals, for doubting a presupposition and in the restrictive use; 3. doubting:, as used in noun clauses, in which only the truth of the associated proposition is put into doubt.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> We expect that other languages will use different words for these three meanings. This is the case in Dutch, for example, where the uses depending on an inferential meaning are indicated by als or the more formal indien, the material implication by zo and doubting by of (which is also used to translate whether). There is only one exception to this, the factual use in Dutch is not indicated by als but by a change in word order.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="16"> Any computer program which purports to understand the English language will need to be able to distinguish between these three different meanings. The last, doubting, is easy to detect as if is then used to introduce a noun clause as opposed to a sub clause. However distinguishing between the inferential and material implication is not solvable on syntactic grounds. One suggestion is to assume that if has an inferential meaning; if no inference relation can be found, then it must be equivalent to material implication. This sholJl~ be easy to decide when if is being used to put a presupposition into doubt or in its restrictive use; more difficult would be to detect material implication in standard uses of if.</Paragraph>
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